The February Report

February was busy. You've all read, I'm sure, of my 2677 edits for The Saints are Dead. Yes, most of them made the book better....but whoa. Just whoa. I wrote several new stories in February ("What Julie's Dad Doesn't Know" and "The North Lantern" being my favorites) and managed my Write 1 / Sub 1 goal of a story submitted a week.

Three stories "sold" in February: "Poe's Blender" to Death Rattle, "Upon Leaving the Candy Factory" to Bourbon Penn, and "The Ballad of Arkady and Nadia" to 100 Stories for Queensland. The latter was a "sale" sale, meaning no money flowed to the writer because it is a charity antho.

On to the Big Experiment...

Because I believe in full disclosure, I present:

Well...I won't be retiring any time soon, but a few things of note:
One of those Bottom Feeders sales was a gift. So I sold eleven legit copies for Kindle, plus one through Smashwords.February's numbers represent the most copies of The Bottom Feeders I've sold since releasing the book last April. The trend is rising from seven last month. Short story collections don't traditionally do as well as novels (in any format), but I'm not complaining. The Bottom Feeders had a crazy little bounce this weekend, selling five copies between Friday and Monday. Not big numbers for some of the Kindle people, but I can't explain the bump. I'll be watching this closely. After all, it is an experiment.
I hope to have We are the Monsters ready by the end of March. It's a novella (35K), and they are traditionally hard to place, after all. Jekyll and Hyde are welcome to live in one skin as long as they want, because I've decided I want one thing out of writing: to tell stories.* To do this, you have to have an audience who wants to listen. Anything which puts a barricade between me and an audience is bad form (did you hear that, Hyde?). In addition, I want my "craft" to be top form so the audience keeps listening (keep subbing to those fine markets, Jekyll).

*wait...I've sort of known that all along.